Glenn Shoosmith

BookingBug becomes de facto global standard for connecting with customers

With today’s news, it’s clear BookingBug is entering a new stage of growth. To provide some background on the journey from a simple idea to high growth scale-up, we caught up with co-founder and CEO, Glenn Shoosmith, to talk about what this means for our customers, partners and team.

Hi Glenn, tell us about the experience of growing BookingBug over the last few years

As we keep growing, it’s hard not to feel some amazement. Yesterday, one of our early investors visited, who has known BookingBug since we were a team of four sat around a table. He couldn’t believe what he was now looking at — and it’s moments like that which hit home to us how far we have come, and how quickly.

Some things have changed and some haven’t. We’ve been lucky to retain a lot of the early team and therefore keep the same enthusiasm and same energy. It’s still a young team but everyone looks a lot busier – and there’s certainly a lot more grey hairs than there were a few years ago.

It’s that team that has made has this incredible growth possible. They’ve really earned this success and become more mature and diligent in their roles as we’ve grown to work with bigger and bigger customers. There’s real focus and awareness of what this company is capable of and a real belief that this is still only the beginning.

The new offices in Boston, Los Angeles and Sydney are each seeded with members of the early team and this is key to retaining this culture of focus and determination as we go global. It’s great to be able to give some of our team from HQ the opportunity to join our teams in the US and Australia. Tools like Slack and regular video all-hands meeting with the global team mean we can’t end up too far from a shared culture too.

How has your experience with partners changed?
We don’t feel like outsiders or the little guys anymore. We aren’t persuading anyone to take a risk on a relatively new option.

We’ve moved so swiftly in retail from being a plucky upstart to the de facto standard. Retailers are saying “you’re the recommended solution in the market”. Remember, we now work with basically every department store in the UK — but it wasn’t always the case. Going down the high street I can’t help but grin walking past customer after customer and being immensely proud of what our team has achieved.

We’ve been lucky that great, innovative retail companies sometimes took a relative risk on us, which paid off. It feels strange to have gone from being the partner that companies were carefully scrutinising to the “safe bet”.

Retail was only the beginning. Financial Services analyst Celent recently named BookingBug as a market leader in Digital Appointment Booking. Over the last two years, we’ve been working some of the biggest names in banking, telecoms and government in both the UK and US, with more and more inquiries arriving every day. This isn’t just about online bookings anymore. It’s about the entire online and offline customer journey.

We’ve created a platform to bring every element together, from in-store appointments to clienteling and traffic activation. On top of that, BookingBug has partnered with some of the world’s best technology, allowing us to combine our expertise to offer a whole suite of services built from our experiences.

Now seems a great time to look at BookingBug and shout about how proud the founders are of the team, our customers and the product we have built together.